Coming January, Windows 7 will make its big debut in the form of the first public beta release. However, just as with any other pre-final Windows build, it has already been leaked onto various torrent websites, and Paul Thurrot, everyone's favourite Microsoft zealot ["...hopefully Web site owners will get serious about getting ready for the next IE and correct these issues." Wait, what?], has written a review of this new beta. He concludes: "In use, Windows 7 is fairly unexceptional in the sense that, yes, it has some nice improvements over Windows Vista, but, no, none of them are particularly major changes. In this sense, Windows 7 is much like your typical Microsoft Office release, a nicely tweaked version of the previous release. (Cue the obvious Steven Sinofsky anecdote here, I guess.) That said, Windows Vista is clearly in need of a spit-shine, not to mention a public execution, and Windows 7 will provide Microsoft with a way to do both."

Nod32 is the only thing that would seriously impact boot time that sits in my systray. But the same software and drivers were installed on the same machine, and the windows 7 install didn't thrash the disc at boot the way vista does.

Well, Vista's problem is that it doesn't organize files needed at boot time in a single continuous chunk, then read that chunk directly to ram, notifying the stage 2/kernel when a resource is ready to be used.

Vista merely keeps a list of the files needed, then tries to pull them from wherever they may be as the system starts. If Windows 7 finally got smart and kept track of each file loaded at startup - and their positions and loading order, then would 'reserve' a section of the drive for boot-up, then re-order the physical data on the disk as it is to be read, they would see a decent jump.

Very little other than kernel/services/drivers needs memory during boot-up, so using max memory during this time is inconsequential. The process should start with the Stage 2 boot & kernel strap - first thing. Nothing else should have direct access to the disk except through the proper file system APIs. If something requests a file before it is loaded, it is given a higher incremental value which may - ultimately - cause re-ordering ( providing other files loaded into RAM have yet to be accessed ).